Critical food systems education (CFSE): educating for food sovereignty

ABSTRACT

Food systems education can help individuals and communities transition to more sustainable food systems. Despite the growing scholarship on food systems education, there is a paucity of critical perspectives on its pedagogical methods, learning outcomes, and overarching objectives. This article addresses this gap by integrating insights from critical pedagogy, food justice, food sovereignty, and agroecology, developing a new synthetic area of study and research entitled critical food systems education (CFSE). CFSE is composed of a tripartite perspective, consisting of praxis, policy, and pedagogy. This framework is guided by the following overarching question: How can food systems education prepare individuals and teachers to transform the food system, and help communities attain food sovereignty? Following a review of the food systems education literature, we highlight the constraints of the depoliticized approach by drawing attention to its race and class-based assumptions. We then construct a definition of CFSE, and articulate the theoretical and practical cornerstones of this perspective, which are drawn from critical pedagogy, food justice, food sovereignty, and agroecology. A case study of a seed sovereignty project at a vocational high school associated with Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement is used to exemplify how CFSE can contribute to educating for food sovereignty.

KEYWORDS:

• Agroecology
• food systems education
• critical food systems education
• food sovereignty
• Landless Workers Movement

Notes

1. We acknowledge that certain garden based learning programs and farm to school initiatives incorporate social justice concerns; in our experience, however, these are in the minority in comparison with the larger de-politicized educational food system.

2. See Kloppenburg and Hassanein (2006) for an important rebuttal of Allen and Guthman (2006).

3. Among a burgeoning group of higher education institutions, the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of California Berkeley are two universities that are at the forefront in offering courses that highlight the political nature of agroecology.

4. Although the IFPA-CRMB is located in an MST settlement, it caters to students who live in a variety of agrarian reform settlements that are not affiliated with the MST. These movements include organizations such as the state-level rural workers union.

5. For a detailed history of the social struggle that led to the creation of the IFPA-CRMB, see Meek 2015a, 2015b.

6. Author D. Meek.

7. A pseudonym.

8. The MST is the founder and major actor in the “Permanent campaign against pesticides and for life,” which brings together a range of social movements, NGOs, and university actors to make these critiques, see the campaign website at: http://www.contraosagrotoxicos.org.